Authored by Matt Taibbi via TK News,

Toward the end of work on this story a controversy blew up around the Twitter Files. I learned a little on Thursday night, and then apparently missed a whole drama that took place online Friday while I was trying to put the FBI story together.

Once that story was out, I saw just a few critics weigh in before falling asleep. This morning highlights were passed on to me by friends. The gist was expressed by MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan, who’s taken over the role of Ardent Establishment Moralist from Rachel Maddow, who had a firm grip on it until she spent three years bollocking the Trump-Russia story.

Mehdi’s had a raging cable-on for all things Elon Musk for a while, apparently.

Here’s a tweet from yesterday:

Is this a joke? Taibbi is doing a new Twitter Files thread while continuing to ignore what Musk has done to journalists on this platform for the past 24 hours? Even Weiss has called him out, but Taibbi seems to want to tweet through it. Wow. https://t.co/bkruKarMzP

— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) December 16, 2022

 I actually wasn’t silent about it (see last night’s Substack piece), but even if I had been, so what? These Twitter Files stories that are coming out are getting at issues that have nothing to do with Elon Musk, Keith Olbermann, Aaron Rupar, Barney the Dinosaur, or anyone else.

This is a chance for ordinary Americans to see, from the inside, how their tax dollars have been spent building an elaborate, systematized method of censorship and opinion control, with agencies like the DHS and the DOJ/FBI at the helm. These “enforcement” agencies are not fighting or investigating crime (or even, say, terror plots), they’re just collecting domestic intelligence on a grand scale, and seeking to distort the public’s perception of reality through mass moderation, via programs we’ve been told little to nothing about.

Hasan believes that just as we’re getting this state-sponsored mass-censorship program in our sights, I should stop, beat my breast on Twitter about an unrelated topic every other corporate journalist in the world is already wailing about, and make the story about me at exactly the moment we’ve found good reason for people to focus their attention on agencies like the FBI and the DHS.

There’s a divide in media, mostly generational, with conspicuous exceptions. The current reigning breed of press figure — Mehdi is a perfect example — imagines himself or herself to be first and foremost a political animal, someone who’s primary job is to advocate at all times for a point of view.

There’s an extraordinary emphasis on “calling out,” a concept that didn’t exist when I started doing this job. A parallel example to the lunacy of last night would be the parade of people in the past weeks who insisted I had a responsibility — because we both happened to be on the Twitter Files story — to confront Bari Weiss about past actions of hers involving Columbia University and professors accused of bias against Jewish students.

Because I didn’t throw a fit and walk out on a great story when Bari came on the scene, it’s evidence I’ve “aligned myself with the right.” I imagine once word gets out we were also civil and cooperative as we rummaged through the digital pile, this will be another count in the indictments against us both.

This is the same bugbear that afflicted signatories of the “Harper’s Letter,” many of whom found themselves accused of hypocrisy because they co-signed a statement with (circle one) Bari/J.K. Rowling/David Frum/Katie Herzog/Jesse Singal/Others, who were deemed Bad People for reasons X, Y, Z, etc. The idea was, we don’t judge people on the basis of what they say anymore. Instead, by co-signing a statement with others, we are now responsible — indeed, we’ve implicitly endorsed — the collective actions and opinions accrued over the lifetimes of all the people whose signatures are on the same page with ours.

Therefore you must not sign a statement, even if you believe in every word of it. You have to attach conditions: I won’t sign, you’re supposed to say, until the following three objectionable people are removed. You have to “call out” the very people who may have just gulped hard before agreeing to co-sign a petition with you.

The furor over who signed the Harper’s Letter succeeded in its obvious aim, which was to detract from its simple, humane message, which was good enough for Salman Rushdie and Noam Chomsky: “We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other.”

Instead of debating this proposition, national media turned the Harper’s Letter — quickly rechristened the “now-infamous letter” by the likes of Forbes — into a referendum on the views of people like Bari and J.K. Rowling. Its organizer, Thomas Chatterton Williams, became the subject of appalling attacks, and even after criticizing Donald Trump both in the letter and out of it, was criticized for failing to add enough quantity to his critique, not adding that Trump is a violent demagogue and mendacious racist in addition to something less than a genuine proponent of free speech. The Atlantic even pretended to be aghast that the Harpers signatories could worry about free expression in the pages of a magazine that does not pay its interns.

This was all a show, transparently designed to obscure the point. It’s beyond obvious the same phenomenon is going on with the Twitter Files.

I mentioned a divide in the business. There is another breed of media figure, dwindling in number, which doesn’t care where any interesting information or documentation comes from. Those of us in that group know we’re legally allowed to publish material that’s been stolen, and we’ll take newsworthy revelations from hackers, foreign spies, political zealots of all stripes, and crazy people (especially crazy people: they are some of our best sources). Some of the best journalism has come from interviews with gangsters and convicted murderers. We don’t care: if the stuff is real and newsworthy, we’ll print it.

Subscribers to TK News can read more here…

As usual, the graphics in Friday night’s “Twitter Files” story make the entire thread too large to sneak through Gmail’s size limit. But a readable online version of the thread lives on the TK site. You can find it by clicking here.

Video game industry legend John Carmack, the man who brought us Doom, Quake and Wolfenstein, is done with Facebook’s virtual reality ‘metaverse’ project, which is apparently a complete mess.

The 52-year-old Carmack, who joined Meta from Oculus after its $2 billion acquisition in 2014, said in an internal memo published in part by the NY Times, that he’s “wearied of the fight” and would focus on his own startup – AI firm Keen Technologies, for which he’s raised $20 million.

“It has been a struggle for me,” Carmack wrote in the post. “I have a voice at the highest levels here, so it feels like I should be able to move things, but I’m evidently not persuasive enough.”

When Facebook bought virtual reality company Oculus in 2014, Carmack was one of the most influential voices in the VR world. He decided to stay with the company after CEO Mark Zuckerberg chose to pivot the company’s focus – and name – towards the metaverse.

Yet even though Meta was moving swiftly into an area that Mr. Carmack specialized in, he was sometimes a dissenting voice about how the effort was going. He became known for internal posts that criticized the decision-making and direction set forth by Mr. Zuckerberg and Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s chief technology officer. Mr. Carmack had been working part-time for the company in recent years. -NYT

In an August podcast interview, Carmack said Meta’s $10 billion in losses within the company’s augmented reality and VR division made him “sick to my stomach,” and that the company’s metaverse efforts have been bogged down by concerns over diversity and privacy.

Carmack has also internally criticized features of the company’s Quest VR headsets – saying that the hardware of the Quest 2 headset was “exactly what I wanted to see from the beginning,” but that the software was lacking.

“We built something pretty close to The Right Thing,” he said.

Still, Carmack thinks that Meta has the best shot at pulling off VR.

“V.R. can bring value to most of the people in the world, and no company is better positioned to do it than Meta,” he wrote in his farewell post.

Authored by Katie Spence via The Epoch Times (emphasis ours),

The social media coordination between the Department of Justice (DOJ) and the FBI isn’t limited to Twitter, former Congressman and current CEO of President Trump’s Truth Social, Devin Nunes, alleged in an interview that aired on Newsmakers by NTD and The Epoch Times on Dec. 14.

The Twitter Files, a collection of internal emails and communications made public by Twitter’s new owner, Elon Musk, confirmed what many Conservatives have alleged for years. Namely, Twitter was shadow-banning accounts that didn’t fit a specific ideology and suspending accounts that bucked the chosen political narrative, Nunes claimed.

But, the most concerning revelation in the Twitter Files, according to Nunes, is that the DOJ and the FBI had informants—whether paid or volunteers—that put forward a specific directive to Twitter, and that is likely happening on other social media platforms.

“The coordination that the Department of Justice and the FBI clearly had with Twitter? I don’t think it stops there,” Nunes stated.

“It seems like they were either running informants, or had paid informants, or had volunteers, where they were actively sending information on behalf of the government on who to look into, or who to ban, and that sort of thing.

“The bigger issue is, Twitter is one thing, but what about Facebook? What about Instagram?”

Censorship and Shadow-Banning

According to Nunes, Trump developed Truth Social because, before Musk bought Twitter, Trump recognized that there was absolute control over public discourse in the United States.

Furthermore, that control led to shadow banning and suspending social media accounts, so those accounts couldn’t criticize the controlling regime in the proverbial public square.

And while Nunes further stated that he’d recently discussed the Twitter File drops with Trump—and in general, Trump is glad Musk purchased Twitter—Trump still believes Musk needs to release all of the Twitter Files to the public and not go through cherry-picked journalists.

“What [do] we really need from Elon Musk and Twitter at this point? Just release all the files. Don’t just have selective journalists look at it. Release all the files so everyone can begin to evaluate them. You never know what you’re going to find [with more people looking at the files].”

Nunes said he believes that by releasing all the files, even more will be uncovered by citizen journalists and by Congress. He added he’s not alone in the belief that Musk should release all files and noted that Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s former CEO and founder, also called on Musk to release the Twitter Files to the public.

Legacy Media Silence

The Twitter Files contained explosive revelations. But the legacy media has largely avoided covering the drops. When asked why there was silence, Nunes stated that the legacy media had supported a particular narrative and political party.

Musk revealing damaging information on government censorship has put the media in an interesting predicament where if they cover the files, they also expose their complicity and damaging information to their preferred political group.

“There’s a strange cat-and-mouse game where [Musk] is sitting on what seems to be a treasure trove of really damaging information to not only the fake news media but also to probably many areas within the United States government,” Nunes stated.

Read more here…

Are global audiences tired of hearing Ukraine’s President Zelensky ask for more money? Or is it just ‘Ukraine fatigue’ setting in, which has already for months been observed among the American public, which explains the broader apparent waning interest in the conflict? 

This week Zelensky issued a formal request for FIFA to allow him to share a message of “world peace” just before the kickoff to the World Cup final, scheduled for Sunday, but the world governing soccer body promptly rebuffed the request.

The Ukrainian government is angered and disappointed, given Zelensky has frequently been invited to make appeals before major public events, even including at the Grammys and Cannes Film Festival. This is when he’s not already busy addressing the G7 or UN-sponsored events, or European Parliament. It goes without saying that the World Cup final will be the single most televised and watched event across the globe this year.

According to CNN, Kiev’s lobbying effort is still underway, but Ukraine officials were “surprised” when FIFA quickly reacted negatively: 

The source said Zelensky’s office is offering to appear in a video link to fans in the stadium in Qatar, ahead of the game and was surprised by the negative response. It’s unclear if Zelensky’s message would be live, or taped.

“We thought FIFA wanted to use its platform for the greater good,” the source said.

Is the Ukrainian leader’s ‘superstar’ status waning? 

Likely it has more to do with FIFA walking a tightrope in terms of wanting to avoid political topics and public displays at the Qatar-hosted tournament. So far it’s sought to avoid controversy on everything from the proposed ‘One Love’ armbands that some European teams wanted to wear, to imagery in favor of Iranian anti-government demonstrators. 

FIFA president Gianni Infantino in a Friday news conference explained that the organization had put a stop to a number of attempts to make “political statements” in Qatar because it must “take care of everyone.”

“We are a global organization and we don’t discriminate against anyone,” Infantino explained. “We are defending values, we are defending human rights and rights of everyone at the World Cup. Those fans and the billions watching on TV, they have their own problems. They just want to watch 90 or 120 minutes without having to think about anything, but just enjoying a little moment of pleasure and joy. We have to give them a moment when they can forget about their problems and enjoy football.”

Of course, this very rational, straightforward explanation is unlikely to appease Ukrainian officials… but at least they have the consolation that Zelensky was declared Time’s Person of the Year.

Authored by Michael Snyder via The End of The American Dream blog,

Will 2023 be a year when extremely destructive conflicts erupt all over the world?  We are certainly already living in a time of “wars and rumors of wars”, and tensions are approaching the boiling point in a number of key global flashpoints right now.  If several more major conflicts were to suddenly begin next year, we could potentially witness an extended period of geopolitical instability that would be unlike anything that we have ever witnessed.  It is easy to start wars, but it is much harder to end them.  If you doubt this, just look at what is going on in Ukraine.  There is no end in sight for that conflict, and there are several other wars that could literally erupt at any time. 

The following are 5 global flashpoints which could absolutely explode during the early stages of 2023…

#1 Serbia

Are you ready for another war in the Balkans?  Ethnic tensions have risen to the highest level in more than two decades, and the president of Serbia just convened an emergency gathering of his national security council…

Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić has met his national security council as tensions rise in Kosovo between the authorities there and ethnic Serbs.

On Saturday a stun grenade was thrown at EU police in north Kosovo, where Serbs form a majority, and local police exchanged fire with unknown groups.

Ethnic Serbs set up road blocks after Kosovan police were deployed in a dispute over car number plates.

Some in the region now believe that war is “inevitable”, and Kosovo is already asking NATO to step in and intervene…

At a news conference in Kosovo’s capital Pristina on Sunday, Prime Minister Albin Kurti asked the Kosovo Force (KFOR), a NATO-led international peacekeeping force, to guarantee “freedom of movement,” as he accused “criminal gangs” of blocking roads.

A fragile peace has been preserved in Kosovo since it declared independence from Serbia in 2008 following the 1998-99 war in which NATO intervened to protect Kosovo’s Albanian majority. Serbia does not recognize Kosovo’s independence.

#2 The Disputed Border Between China And India

On Tuesday, we learned that there has been yet another violent clash along the hotly disputed border between China and India…

Soldiers from India and China clashed last week along their disputed border, India’s defense minister said Tuesday, in the latest violence along the contested frontier since June 2020, when troops from both countries were killed in a deadly brawl.

Rajnath Singh, who addressed lawmakers in parliament, said Friday’s encounter along the Tawang sector of eastern Arunachal Pradesh state started when Chinese troops “encroached into Indian territory” and “unilaterally tried to change the status quo” along the disputed border near Yangtze.

The Chinese just can’t seem to stop provoking India, and a full-blown conflict between the two nations could escalate out of control very rapidly.

Let us hope that does not happen, because both China and India possess nuclear weapons.

#3 Taiwan

For a long time, we have been warned that China will eventually invade Taiwan.

Unfortunately, tensions in the region just continue to escalate, and on Tuesday the Chinese sent more bombers into Taiwan’s air defense zone than ever before…

China sent a record 18 nuclear-capable bombers into Taiwan’s air defence zone, Taipei said on Tuesday (Dec 13), just days after Beijing banned more Taiwanese imports in the latest sign of deteriorating ties.

Democratic Taiwan lives under the constant threat of invasion by China, which sees the self-ruled island as part of its territory to be seized one day.

#4 Iran

There will be a war between Iran and Israel.

Of course the IDF has already been regularly hitting Iranian-backed forces inside Syria on a regular basis, but we should be thankful that a full-blown war in which missiles are flying back and forth between the two nations hasn’t started yet.

Unfortunately, we are closer than ever to that point.  In fact, it is being reported that Israel is actually warning that it may bomb the airport in Beirut “if it determines that Iran is smuggling weapons on civilian planes”…

According to Israeli media reports, Israel has warned Lebanon that Israel Defense Forces could bomb Beirut’s airport if it determines that Iran is smuggling weapons on civilian planes destined for the terrorist group Hezbollah. The alleged weapons smuggling was reported by a London-based Arabic language newspaper Asharq Al-Awsat, which quoted Israeli sources who said Israel issued the warning.

When a full-blown war between Iran and Israel finally starts, there will be no holding back by either side.

The death and destruction such a war will cause will shock the entire world, and the global oil trade will be thrown into a state of complete and utter chaos.

#5 Ukraine

The United States and Russia both continue to escalate the horrifying conflict in Ukraine.

Now that Russia is bombing the living daylights out of Ukraine’s power grid, the U.S. is choosing to respond by giving Patriot missiles systems to the Ukrainians…

Pentagon officials are in the final stages of preparing a plan to send a Patriot air defense missile system to Ukraine to counter Russian aerial assaults, U.S. officials told CBS News.

The plan has not yet been approved by either the Pentagon or the White House, but that could come as early as this week.

This represents a major escalation, and it is also being reported that the Biden administration has given the Ukrainian government the green light to conduct drone strikes deep inside of Russia.

Needless to say, the Russians are not pleased at all about having to deal with drone strikes deep inside their own territory.  In fact, some prominent Russian voices are warning that the U.S. and Russia are getting dangerously close to the unthinkable.  The following comes from a British news source…

Mad Vlad Putin’s henchmen have fired a warning shot that the Ukraine conflict could turn into a “full-scale nuclear war.”

They made the stark comments after the US gave the go-ahead for Kyiv to kick off drone strikes into Russia.

We don’t see such talk on U.S. television.

The Biden administration continues to assure all of us that the risk of nuclear war is extremely low, but the Russians see things very differently…

One source in Putin’s circle said: “This is playing with fire, risking full-scale war which could easily go nuclear.”

Another added: “Who will now give Moscow the green light for strikes against Ukrainian decision-making centres?”

Most people never imagined that World War I would get as bad as it did.

And most people never imagined that World War II would result in tens of millions of deaths.

Now we have entered the early stages of a third world war, and this time the major participants are armed with nuclear weapons.

If we don’t pull back from the brink, the consequences could potentially be far beyond what most people could even imagine right now.

So let us pray for peace, because a global war in which hundreds of millions of people die is not an acceptable option.

*  *  *

It is finally here! Michael’s new book entitled “End Times” is now available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.

A magnitude 5.4 earthquake rattled parts of the Permian basin on Friday. The area is the largest oil-producing region in the US, located in West Texas — and has more fracking operations than anywhere in the world.

The US Geological Survey said the quake struck northwest of Midland around 5:35 pm local time, and three minutes later, a tremor of magnitude 3.3 followed. 

It’s the second time in 30 days that a sizeable quake has hit the West Texas region. The last was Nov. 16, when a 5.3-magnitude earthquake hit the area. 

“I thought it was the wind until I realized the wind wouldn’t be making the light fixtures sway. Midland will get tremors that are rarely even felt but that was a full blown earthquake,” someone in West Texas tweeted. 

I thought it was the wind until I realized the wind wouldn’t be making the light fixtures sway. Midland will get tremors that are rarely even felt but that was a full blown earthquake.

— Wallflower Power ✌️ (@ellawscott) December 16, 2022

On Friday evening, the National Weather Service’s Midland tweeted:

“We just felt an earthquake here at the office! While we don’t actively monitor or track earthquakes … but this would be the 4th strongest earthquake in Texas state history!”

Preliminary data from the USGS reports the earthquake was a magnitude 5.3 centered 12 miles to the NNW of Midland with a depth of 3 miles. This would be the 4th strongest earthquake in Texas state history! #txwx #earthquake

— NWS Midland (@NWSMidland) December 16, 2022

Earthquakes have been linked to fracking operations. Latest data via Bloomberg shows shale oil production in Permian Basin has jumped to a record high.

The USGS wrote in a recent study that a magnitude-five quake that struck West Texas in 2020 resulted from frackers injecting wastewater into wells in the region.

Authored by Kyle Anzalone via AntiWar.com,

The White House believes Ukraine’s military could retake the Crimean Peninsula from Russia. However, officials say the offensive may cross Moscow’s “red lines” and prompt a nuclear strike.

The Biden administration has radically changed its view of Kiev’s military since Russia invaded nearly ten months ago. The Ukrainians “continue to shock the world with how well they’re performing on the battlefield,” an unnamed official said.

The White House now assesses that the Ukrainian armed forces are capable of retaking Crimea, with NBC News reporting that statements to that effect were made to lawmakers during a Congressional hearing last month. The administration official was attempting to explain to Congress why Kiev still needs American support.

The Crimean Peninsula was a region of Ukraine before it was annexed by Russia in 2014. While a referendum of Crimean citizens backed Russian President Vladimir Putin’s decision, Kiev and Washington assert the peninsula still belongs to Ukraine.

Sources reached by NBC News said the White House believes Putin will respond sharply to a successful Ukrainian offensive in Crimea. “Putin may react more strongly to Crimea,” one official said, while a former administration staffer added “That’s the red line.”

The White House does not believe Ukrainian military operations in Crimea to be imminent. “A lot would have to happen militarily first” before Ukraine could begin a real offensive to retake Crimea, an official stated.

However, the Biden administration has been surprised by some of Ukraine’s most advanced military operations.

Two US officials and an American defense staffer said the White House was caught off guard and frustrated after Kiev launched a series of three drone attacks strikes deep inside Russian territory.

In the latest release of ‘THE TWITTER FILES,’ journalist Matt Taibbi details how Twitter acted as a ‘subsidiary’ of the FBI.

As a reminder, parts 1-3 of the series covered respectively, Twitter’s decision to interfere in the 2020 election by censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story, how the company created secret blacklists, and how they justified removing former President Donald Trump despite internally agreeing that he didn’t break any rules (parts one, two and three).

Take it away, Matt:

2. The #TwitterFiles are revealing more every day about how the government collects, analyzes, and flags your social media content.

— Matt Taibbi (@mtaibbi) December 16, 2022

Continued:

3. Twitter’s contact with the FBI was constant and pervasive, as if it were a subsidiary.

4. Between January 2020 and November 2022, there were over 150 emails between the FBI and former Twitter Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth.

5. Some are mundane, like San Francisco agent Elvis Chan wishing Roth a Happy New Year along with a reminder to attend “our quarterly call next week.” Others are requests for information into Twitter users related to active investigations.

 

6. But a surprisingly high number are requests by the FBI for Twitter to take action on election misinformation, even involving joke tweets from low-follower accounts.

 

7. The FBI’s social media-focused task force, known as FTIF, created in the wake of the 2016 election, swelled to 80 agents and corresponded with Twitter to identify alleged foreign influence and election tampering of all kinds.

 

8. Federal intelligence and law enforcement reach into Twitter included the Department of Homeland Security, which partnered with security contractors and think tanks to pressure Twitter to moderate content.

 

9. It’s no secret the government analyzes bulk data for all sorts of purposes, everything from tracking terror suspects to making economic forecasts.

 

10. The #TwitterFiles show something new: agencies like the FBI and DHS regularly sending social media content to Twitter through multiple entry points, pre-flagged for moderation.

 

11. What stands out is the sheer quantity of reports from the government. Some are aggregated from public hotlines:

12. An unanswered question: do agencies like FBI and DHS do in-house flagging work themselves, or farm it out? “You have to prove to me that inside the fucking government you can do any kind of massive data or AI search,” says one former intelligence officer.

 

13. “HELLO TWITTER CONTACTS”: The master-canine quality of the FBI’s relationship to Twitter comes through in this November 2022 email, in which “FBI San Francisco is notifying you” it wants action on four accounts:

 

14.Twitter personnel in that case went on to look for reasons to suspend all four accounts, including @fromMA, whose tweets are almost all jokes (see sample below), including his “civic misinformation” of Nov. 8:

 

 

15. Just to show the FBI can be hyper-intrusive in both directions, they also asked Twitter to review a blue-leaning account for a different joke, except here it was even more obvious that @ClaireFosterPHD, who kids a lot, was kidding:

 

16. “Anyone who cannot discern obvious satire from reality has no place making decisions for others or working for the feds,” said @ClaireFosterPHD, when told about the flagging.

 

17.Of the six accounts mentioned in the previous two emails, all but two – @ClaireFosterPHD and @fromMA – were suspended.

 

18.In an internal email from November 5, 2022, the FBI’s National Election Command Post, which compiles and sends on complaints, sent the SF field office a long list of accounts that “may warrant additional action”:

 

19.Agent Chan passed the list on to his “Twitter folks”:

20. Twitter then replied with its list of actions taken. Note mercy shown to actor Billy Baldwin:

21.Many of the above accounts were satirical in nature, nearly all (with the exceptions of Baldwin and @RSBNetwork) were relatively low engagement, and some were suspended, most with a generic, “Thanks, Twitter” letter:

22.When told of the FBI flagging, @lexitollah replied: “My thoughts initially include 1. Seems like prima facie 1A violation 2. Holy cow, me, an account with the reach of an amoeba 3. What else are they looking at?”

 

23.“I can’t believe the FBI is policing jokes on Twitter. That’s crazy,” said @Tiberius444.

 

24.In a letter to former Deputy General Counsel (and former top FBI lawyer) Jim Baker on Sep. 16, 2022, legal exec Stacia Cardille outlines results from her “soon to be weekly” meeting with DHS, DOJ, FBI, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence:

 

25.The Twitter exec writes she explicitly asked if there were “impediments” to the sharing of classified information “with industry.” The answer? “FBI was adamant no impediments to sharing exist.”

26. This passage underscores the unique one-big-happy-family vibe between Twitter and the FBI. With what other firm would the FBI blithely agree to “no impediments” to classified information?

27.At the bottom of that letter, she lists a series of “escalations” apparently raised at the meeting, which were already “handled.”

 

28. About one, she writes: “Flagged a specific Tweet on Illinois use of modems to transmit election results in possible violation of the civic integrity policy (except they do use that tech in limited circumstances).”

29.Another internal letter from January, 2021 shows Twitter execs processing an FBI list of “possible violative content” tweets:

30.Here, too, most tweets contained the same, “Get out there and vote Wednesday!” trope and had low engagement. This is what the FBI spends its time on:

 

31. In this March, 2021 email, an FBI liaison thanks a senior Twitter exec for the chance to speak to “you and the team,” then delivers a packet of “products”:

 

32.The executive circulates the “products,” which are really DHS bulletins stressing the need for greater collaboration between law enforcement and “private sector partners.”

33.The ubiquity of the 2016 Russian interference story as stated pretext for building out the censorship machine can’t be overstated. It’s analogous to how 9/11 inspired the expansion of the security state.

34.While the DHS in its “products” pans “permissive” social media for offering “operational advantages” to Russians, it also explains that the “Domestic Violent Extremist Threat” requires addressing “information gaps”:

35.FBI in one case sent over so many “possible violative content” reports, Twitter personnel congratulated each other in Slack for the “monumental undertaking” of reviewing them:

36.There were multiple points of entry into Twitter for government-flagged reports. This letter from Agent Chan to Roth references Teleporter, a platform through which Twitter could receive reports from the FBI:

37.Reports also came from different agencies. Here, an employee recommends “bouncing” content based on evidence from “DHS etc”:

38.State governments also flagged content.

 

39.Twitter for instance received reports via the Partner Support Portal, an outlet created by the Center for Internet Security, a partner organization to the DHS.

 

40.“WHY WAS NO ACTION TAKEN?” Below, Twitter execs – receiving an alert from California officials, by way of “our partner support portal” – debate whether to act on a Trump tweet:

 

41.Here, a video was reported by the Election Integrity Project (EIP) at Stanford, apparently on the strength of information from the Center for Internet Security (CIS):

42.If that’s confusing, it’s because the CIS is a DHS contractor, describes itself as “partners” with the Cyber and Internet Security Agency (CISA) at the DHS:

43.The EIP is one of a series of government-affiliated think tanks that mass-review content, a list that also includes the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensics Research Laboratory, and the University of Washington’s Center for Informed Policy.

 

44.The takeaway: what most people think of as the “deep state” is really a tangled collaboration of state agencies, private contractors, and (sometimes state-funded) NGOs. The lines become so blurred as to be meaningless.

 

45. Twitter Files researchers are moving into a variety of new areas now. Watch @bariweiss, @ShellenbergerMD, and this space for more, soon.

KABOOM 💥💥💥💥💥 https://t.co/TS3jFZ51VR

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 16, 2022

Also the irony of where the real interference came from https://t.co/tye6NEiRTu

— zerohedge (@zerohedge) December 16, 2022

🤔”something new”…

Instead of waiting for flagged content to gain warrants, the Obama approach allowed FBI/DHS/DOJ-NSD to analyze raw data scraped as the result of *new warrantless self-granted surveillance authorities* to monitor domestic speech and communication networks. https://t.co/7UuoVFm1Up

— TheLastRefuge (@TheLastRefuge2) December 16, 2022

FBI asked Twitter to track physical locations of users who said the 2020 election was stolen.

Holy hell. Twitter was basically used as a surveillance tool by the FBI so they could conduct intimidation raids at peoples’ homes if they made posts questioning the 2020 election. 😳 https://t.co/du8rIeRpr7

— Laura Loomer (@LauraLoomer) December 16, 2022

Authored by Claudio Grass via The Mises Institute,

In mid-November, while the whole world was focused on the Ukraine crisis, the US midterms or whatever other “big story” the media decided was more important, a truly momentous shift took place in the global financial system. It might seem like a small step on the surface, but it has the potential to bring about a real and possibly irreversible sea change in the way we use money; or better said, the way it uses us.

As Reuters reported on the 15th of November, “Global banking giants are starting a 12-week digital dollar pilot with the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Citigroup Inc , HSBC Holdings Pl, Mastercard Inc and Wells Fargo & Co are among the financial companies participating in the experiment alongside the New York Fed’s innovation center, they said in a statement. The project, which is called the regulated liability network, will be conducted in a test environment and use simulated data, the New York Fed said. The pilot will test how banks using digital dollar tokens in a common database can help speed up payments.”

Shockingly enough, essentially zero attention was paid to the story. Most media outlets mentioned it in passing and offered little to no context that would make the unsuspecting reader aware of the implications of this development. There was no mainstream discussion or debate about what this means or about how it can affect the average citizen, and no politicians, Fed officials or other institutional figures called any attention to it and argued either for or against it.

There was one notable exception, though, one high-profile individual that noticed what could mark the start of a tectonic shift and thought the rest of the world should notice too: Edward Snowden.

The aforementioned context that should have been provided to the average news reader that is not necessarily familiar with the concept of CBDCs (Central Bank Digital Currencies) would include at least a brief explanation what they are, what purposes they serve and how they compare to existing fiat paper money. As I outlined in previous articles, the stakes are too high for people to ignore this development. Whoever controls the money, controls everything and the rise of CBDCs threatens to make that control absolute, closing whatever little “loopholes” of freedom may still exist today.

To most citizens, savers and taxpayers, the transition to a digital dollar might seem harmless, or even beneficial, given that most of the population today associates digitalization with convenience and speed. Indeed, if one doesn’t understand the ins and outs of monetary history, of fiat money and of digital currencies, this concept appears totally innocuous. But even for many who do understand these things, it might seem like such a step would really make no difference. Junk money is junk money after all, be it physical or digital, it’s still backed by nothing, right?

Well, that is right indeed, but there’s a lot more to it. While the currency itself will continue to be worthless, its digital form will come with a bunch of perks and advantages for central planners. As Eswar Prasad, professor of trade policy and economics at Cornell University, puts it:

One should recognize that the CBDC creates new opportunity for monetary policy. If we all had CBDC accounts instead of cash, in principle it might be possible to implement negative interest rates simply by shrinking balances in CBDC accounts. It will become a lot easier to undertake helicopter drops of money. If everybody had a CBDC account, one could easily increase the balance in those accounts.

What this essentially means is that any choice that remains and any degree of financial sovereignty that is left in the present system could be easily wiped out by CBDCs. And its not only financial freedom that’s at stake: these centralized digital currencies can be used by governments to monitor, to control and even to directly punish dissenters, by blocking transactions, freezing their accounts or seizing they assets. Some might find that farfetched, but those are probably the same people who thought that China’s “Social Credit System” was implausible too, right up to the moment it was actually implemented.

Hate speech cases across Western Europe are growing more outrageous by the year, with the latest example out of Norway reaching new heights of absurdity. This as various countries’ laws get narrower and narrower over what can or cannot be said regarding ‘gender identity’. 

A woman in Norway is being threatened by the government with a stiff prison sentence for the alleged “hate speech crime” of pointing out that a man cannon become a lesbian.

What’s more is that the filmmaker and actress currently under investigation by Norwegian authorities, Tonje Gjevjon, is herself a lesbian – and quite a prominent personality in popular culture as well. On the other side, is a “transgender female” who claims to be a “lesbian mother” named Christine Jentoft, who has a history of publicly denouncing people for ‘transphobia’.

Gjevjon’s offending words which triggered outrage were previously posted to Facebook as follows:

“It’s just as impossible for men to become a lesbian as it is for men to become pregnant. Men are men regardless of their sexual fetishes,” the post stated.

She was then informed on November 17 that there’s now a formal criminal investigation which was opened by prosecutors for allegedly violating national laws related to protecting “gender identity and gender expression”.

Gjevjon has long been on record as saying that the trans agenda is in reality “harmful” and “discriminatory”  for women, especially lesbians. Last year, for example, she called on government ministers to “take action to ensure that lesbian women’s human rights are safeguarded, by making it clear that there are no lesbians with penises, that males cannot be lesbians regardless of their gender identity.”

Her Facebook posts are now subject of a criminal probe. Gjevjon has said the country’s laws have in effect become discriminatory against women.

The Minister of Culture and Equality Anette Trettebergstuen responded to this challenge publicly by saying, “I do not share an understanding of reality where the only two biological sexes are to be understood as sex. Gender identity is also important.”

Trans activists have long been out to get Gjevjon, with the actress and filmmaker later saying she knew her Facebook post would result in an avalanche of backlash. Meanwhile, her opponents have repeatedly denounced her as a “trans-exclusionary radical feminist”, or TERF. The whole issue is similar to denunciations of J.K. Rowling and the so-called “trans community” trying to get her de-platformed.